Russia has never been busier — or more exhausted. After three years of war, the Kremlin boasts record-low unemployment and record-high labor shortages. Factories can’t find welders, farms can’t find drivers, and the defense industry is devouring what’s left of the civilian workforce. The result is an economy that runs without advancing — its motion mistaken for vitality.
Behind the numbers lies a demographic crisis decades in the making. Russia’s official unemployment rate hovers near 2%, but its manufacturing sector faces a deficit of over 1.9 million people. Mobilization, emigration, and mortality have gutted the country’s working-age population. More than 900,000 men have been drafted or killed since the invasion began, and another 650,000 have fled abroad. The skilled trades have been hardest hit, draining the very sectors the Kremlin depends on to sustain its war machine.
To fill the gaps, Moscow is importing labor at a scale not seen since the Soviet-era. In 2024 alone, Russian defense plants employed nearly 50,000 foreign workers, most from Central Asia and Africa. Military-linked agencies are now recruiting African women for assembly-line work, offering salaries as low as $500 a month. The state has even turned to Pyongyang, signing covert agreements to bring in thousands of North Korean construction and factory laborers in defiance of U.N. sanctions. These workers operate under strict surveillance, often without proper contracts, legal protections, or the right to leave.
Authoritarian Productivity
The Kremlin’s answer to scarcity has been control. This is the defining feature of what economists call authoritarian productivity. The same state that manages elections through quotas now manages production the same way. Ministries boast record employment; regional leaders declare “industrial revival.” But the numbers lie. Russia’s Purchasing Managers’ Index — a widely used indicator that measures whether an industrial sector is expanding or contracting — sank to 47.5 in July, its lowest point in over a year. A Purchasing Manager’s Index (PMI) above 50 signals growth; anything below indicates a contraction.
Russia’s model of authoritarian productivity incentivizes factories, ministries, and regional governments to report success regardless of output, producing a feedback loop that rewards obedience. As a result, data becomes theater. The consequences are structural. When every level of the system is rewarded for reporting perfection, no level has an incentive to reveal failure. Supply shortages go unaddressed because they are hidden; skill gaps persist because they are politically inconvenient to acknowledge; and production bottlenecks multiply because the people best positioned to identify them risk punishment for speaking honestly.
Authoritarian productivity thus creates a distinctive form of blindness. The state demands more information than ever, yet it undermines the very conditions required to obtain it. Factories operate at “record capacity” even as machinery ages. Employment appears full even as the labor force shrinks. And industrial “growth” continues on paper long after it has stalled in practice.
Procedure without Progress
This shift is rooted in political theory. Max Weber, German sociologist and political economist, warned that modern bureaucracies risk falling into what he called rational irrationality — so fixated on procedure, they forget purpose. These systems are so consumed by rules, efficiency metrics, and paperwork that they lose sight of the human purposes they were meant to serve. Russia’s institutions embody this perfectly. Success is measured through quota compliance instead of output. The war economy has thus become a performance of order that masquerades obedience as efficiency.
Hannah Arendt’s insight that totalitarian systems rely on exhaustion, not conviction, becomes relevant here. In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the German and American historian and philosopher observed that such regimes depend less on belief than on exhaustion. When citizens are overworked, surveilled, and deprived of their agency, persuasion is no longer required. Russia’s mobilized workforce epitomizes this logic: engineers have become conscripts in overalls, and factory shifts mirror military drills.
This dynamic also mirrors Karl Marx’s theory of alienation, articulated in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Marx argued that workers become estranged from their own labor when they lose control over what they produce, how they produce it, and why they produce it. Under Russia’s war economy, this alienation is intensified: laborers lose control over mobility, choice, and time itself. Rather than a product, they work towards the preservation of a system that diminishes them. Arendt called this the annihilation of spontaneity, the reduction of human action to mechanical repetition. In today’s Russia, that repetition fuels both the economy and the illusion of control.
As a result, three structural fault-lines appear, each illustrating how political control corrodes economic capacity.
The first is skill attrition. Mobilization, emigration, and casualty losses have hollowed out Russia’s technical base, stripping away the mid-career engineers, machinists, and welders who once sustained its industrial backbone. Weber would have called this the bureaucratization of knowledge: as the state replaces expertise with hierarchy, it trades competence for compliance. Factories lose institutional memory because their workers’ autonomy has vanished.
The second is a perverse incentive. Quotas reward hiring over quality, encouraging managers to inflate numbers and conceal inefficiency. Factories report “full staffing” even as output per worker declines. Here, Weber’s “iron cage” becomes literal. Within it, individuals act to avoid punishment. Arendt might call this the triumph of mechanical obedience, where initiative is replaced by fear. Every fabricated statistic props up the illusion of progress, a performance staged for stability.
The third is sovereignty erosion. Dependence on foreign and coerced labor — North Korean construction crews, African assembly-line recruits, Central Asian welders — outsources both productivity and accountability. Instead of rebuilding its own human capital, Moscow is constructing an economy dependent on workers who cannot protest, organize, or leave, eroding any remaining sense of sovereignty. According to Arendt, this is labor stripped of political meaning. The worker’s body has become the final resource of the state: disciplined, yet disposable. A regime that once defined power through control of territory now defines it through control of fatigue.
Together, these fractures reveal an economy built to imitate productivity. In Marxist terms, labor has been alienated twice over — first from production, then from purpose. In this sense, Russia’s factories resemble its politics: outwardly disciplined, inwardly collapsing. The machinery keeps running, not to create, but to remember what creation once meant.
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